They were the only side concerned with ever having to win an election again. I don’t think the literal insurrectionist side is concerned with public opinion that disagrees with them.

Plus, Trump is supporting Israel wiping Palestinians off the map (he literally made that video about turning it into a resort), and will probably support Israel if they try to start consuming Lebanon and Syria (which they already have been for a really long time in case you didn’t know). You realize if they cease to exist, there’s a literally 0 chance things get any better.

I didn’t say it would be a magical fix, I was just saying relatively speaking. Also sometimes shit takes time, I’ve had to wait 14 years to watch Syria finally rid itself of that asswipe bashar. Anything above zero is better than zero. Having to make that choice is why I was born here and not in another country you might be able to take a guess at.

In fact I watched the entire Arab Spring unfold (on Aljazeera where they actually covered it) and saw the same people now on the side of ending the Palestinian genocide, be against Obama helping intervene in support of the oppressed people of those countries who were getting massacred by western weapons used by their fucked up genocidal leaders, while said people were literally begging us for help. I watched France be the one to take the lead and say they would establish the No Fly Zone if the US didn’t, when the hand wringing was going on for weeks and the rebels taking a heavy price for that delay, only afterwards would the US and other countries step in to finally help. Even then there was a ton of shit from the side “looking out” for arabs today and I took note of the utter lack of humanity in the words I heard being spoke, despite how polite and pleasant they were made to sound.

After Libya, there was no political will left to help in Syria, and the Syrian situation was just a bit too “messy” to get involved with, so the result was basically “fuck em”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad people care enough to protest in the street about this shit finally, and I don’t want to shut you down with the arab card or anything, just for real, I grew up with stories about this as a child. It fucking sucks but I can be realistic enough to know entrenched career politicians who’ve had to survive the “cant disagree with Israel” political purge that was basically ongoing until 2023, are going to turn on a dime in the last quarter of an election cycle. I’m down with all the change/improving the fucked up political system (assuming that’s even an option anymore) but that hasn’t happened yet, this was the old system, and it works a certain way or it doesn’t work at all.

But I’m also not cynical enough to say the two options were in any way equal.

You are not that person. You are you and this would be a decision you make, not some other person. The question is, do you feel like a simple label, controlled by someone else, able to shift from under your feet without your input, is capable of succinctly summing you up to another person? Is your life, your thoughts, your experiences, so capable of being put into such a box, to your satisfaction?

Or are you more dynamic, storied, multi-faceted, vibrant, and in charge of your own thoughts, than a single word defined by a perfect stranger, could possibly describe? And I don’t mean your external self (visual appearance), I mean the person you are inside your own head.

I don’t know you, but I’d prefer to think you’re probably the latter…

But that’s for you to decide.

Or abandon the political labeling system entirely and make it socially outdated by learning to confront someone labeling themselves by responding to them with something along the lines of: “Why would you allow someone else to tell you what it is you believe in? You don’t get to decide what being a conservative/liberal means. Someone else decides that. You aren’t part of it. So why would you let whoever that is tell you what you should think?”

Change the meaning of what it means to even use the labels and the weapon of using the labels to divide us no longer functions.

It has been dismantled, and they will have to come up with something else.

And just because they will eventually invent a new weapon, does not make it pointless. This is just the never ending metaphorical arms race we are all living in, but it gets easier once you see it for what it is.

I realize that’s what it was at face value but the reality worth keeping in mind is that one side would have likely been more open to continued pressure to shift stances after the election, but felt like they had to say certain things publicly prior to the election because this country spent the past 30+ years ejecting anyone that didn’t fully back Israel.

People only started caring enough to make this an issue within the past year. I’m not trying to shift blame or apologize for the system, but in what world can that sort of political entrenchment combined with the drawn out multi year election cycle be completely undone within a single election year?

This was all set in motion in 2016 and whats happening now is just that boulder coming to rest. Entire generations have been born and died (and/or murdered) in this prison.

Perhaps it’s best to make the distinction that this is creating a new type of predator, Violence Predators. Because that’s what the problem is. Right now they are going after the targets no one cares about, when they run low on those targets, either because the need for “content/violence” outpaces the supply of easy targets, some of them will find new ones, while using the old label to mask what they are doing.

So make that distinction, because it’s not about the people hunting pedophiles, it’s about the people hunting for violence. If there’s an overlap that doesn’t need to be the focus of the argument, because that’s the red herring.

Haha, yeah we had one of those cable boxes too and also used the switch box thing that would switch between the 1-60 and 60-120 channel range at one point. Fucking with analog devices was fun times.

I wasn’t big into the cable porn though (I watched a lot of HBO standup on the box) cause I also grew up learning how to navigate warez sites and having to dodge porn popups (not always of course lol) to get my 52 part-zip files, each 15mb piece hosted on a different free geocities account, to recombine into GTA 1 and pray the link to piece #45 wasn’t broken, lol.

Ok, for real this just helped me make sense of a whole mess of stressful shit running through my brain today. Thank you.

They all banked the first time he was president. It’s all us regular people who got boned.